I've never understood why anyone gets a hard on about what final few letters a domain is under. What is relevant is if somewhere as important as blockchain.info owns as many iterations of its domain as possible.

The possibilities for fuckery are otherwise infinite. You see it quite often with other services too.

I fear NOTHING. But I am starting to wonder about who's in the driving seat these days and what their motivation is.

There are two schools of thought. The people with the money and the power want either - to scoop it all up and feed the crumbs back to the little people, or squash it flat and keep it squashed. They've got the funds to do both. I wonder which'll win out.

https://www.investopedia.com/tech/eth-and-btc-not-securities-wheres-surge/

An interesting bit of analysis from someone in the article though I've no idea how he linked it to this announcement -

'Yaniv Altshuler, CEO and Founder of the AI-powered predictive analytics platform Endor claims that the company has "analyzed the blockchain activity in the weeks prior to this announcement and have detected the formation of several structures - each comprising dozens of thousands of wallets. These formations are seemingly decentralized yet display highly correlated behavior. In the days before the announcement took place, we observed that these entities started accumulating large amounts of ETH and BTC. We suspect that this implies the existence of a prior information that was know to whoever operated these large collection of wallets. This behavior acted in part as a "cushion", creating early demand before the announcement, and absorbing some of the demand that was created following it, by releasing tokens back to the market."

These “operators” hold significant influence and have been suspected to manipulate and distort prices for their own benefit.'

I do wish market cap could be uninvented as a metric. It means nothing.

That 17 billion never existed. You could knock tens of millions off the market cap with sells that net the sellers a few thousand dollars.

Shorting's been around for years as have futures via OKcoin. They were available via places with a direct stake in the Bitcoin market which is why I don't get why people are having willies about this. The only reason I can think of is because they somehow believe it's more authoritative when in reality it's far less relevant than before.

This is what I'm failing to get.

Scary.

I don't know who to turn to.

Hold me.

Of course most of them immediately sell. And Bitpay do it for them automatically. And Bitpay have an army of OTC buyers who take them straight off their hands without ever seeing an open market. Where else are you going to get a totally dependable stream of coins other than miners?

Wut?

What I'm most interested in about all this is once definitions are in place, what are they going to do about ones that have already passed? I get the feeling they're not massively inclined to pursue previous ICOs unless they're blatantly criminal, but then again there are so many of those they're going to have their hands full for years anyway.

There's a lot of unhappiness and uncertainty but is there an actual crisis? This is an ongoing part of a cycle that's now happened multiple times before. I no longer see why anyone should be surprised by what's happening. They should be surprised if it had gone sideways for a year at 15 grand.

By the time it's done and dusted I expect most of the shite that popped up to be dust, especially ICO stuff. If it isn't the emptiness of their undelivered promises, it'll be all of them having their arses fined off by the SEC.

He strikes me as a bit of a silly sausage but it's awful premature to call a bottom. I don't think we're close to the point of maximum pain by any means, especially when there are so many shitcoins right up there. I'd be waiting until autumn before I was confident of a particular phase being fully over.

In the EU at least you can still get an anonymous conventional prepaid card up to 250 euros in total capacity. That's so piddling that I can't see most providers attempting it but perhaps one might look into at and rape their customers accordingly. Then again they'd probably be throwing away the legit end of things so it would be barely worth it. 

I'd love to read a proper analysis of the effects of futures so far for the layman - a thicko like me. I've yet to feel like anyone has informed me.

Everyone saying 'the launch of futures coincided with the fall' kinda forgets to remember the humongous bubble at the same time. Futures volumes started off microscopic so no one was making bank off them by crashing the bitcoin market itself.

It could've been a giant case of selling the news or the aligning of multiple unaligned factors. And so far the price falls and percentages are following similar trajectories to previous ones.

Was blockchain.com ever owned by someone else? If not then I find it odd they didn't migrate much earlier.

I find domains weirdly fascinating. I read that places like carinsurance.com are valued so highly because a significant proportion of people don't use search engines at all and type in domains directly. That's really going to get you the deal of the century.

I was in the garage warming up my Killdozer and uploading my slaughter route when my price alarm went off.

Next time, I guess. Now I have to weld myself out of the fucking thing.

Doesn't uttering, let alone selling, the bb phrase on this forum earn an instant banhammer nuke from orbit? It's the most tired insult rolled out by zero post bear zombies. It must be the ultimate BTC taboo.

Since we've gone far below the old 6666 favourite I'll plump for the next symbolic number which is $2121.21 even if it hasn't made much of a market appearance in the past. I expect more witches and goblins and tricksters to start trading over the coming months.

I can't stand almost all theatre, but I'd be intrigued to see how they framed this.

One day there will be epic works of fiction and non fiction built around the whole SR thing once enough of the truth comes out. I wonder if it ever will. It's truly one of the most bizarre and sprawling canvases of our time.

Or are you shitting yourself?

I myself was underwater for about two and a half years with Bitcoin. Despite that I was confident the price would recover eventually, though getting its skates on would certainly have helped.

Does reading about such a recovery and massive rise from a trough that gut wrenching give you any comfort if you're presently a long way down or is it none at all?

You can do it in two minutes for about $18 in fees with NEM -

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eA5JZhwtFRg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XYic0ew-NuQ

Creating something is the easy part. Getting it established, hyped and traded is where the serious work begins and to do that right might cost millions. Of course you may also be able to gouge millions out of people with a pre sale of some sort.

The rich are, well, already rich so they're going to be less inclined to be making wild crypto bets. They'll already have an established source of wealth.

I can see them allocating a small proportion to have a play, but there's little reason to fully go for it when you have wealth to nurture rather than build.

Bitcoin's dominance is heading up. By the time this bubble is fully done many coins will be headed towards worthlessness. It's likely that BTC will be a stronger presence than when it entered this bubble.

He has a point, but it's clear there's really only two markets at most - Bitcoin and alts, and more likely just the crypto market itself. Some shitcoin only gets where it does off the back of larger coins and that's always going to be BTC.